Thursday, March 9, 2017

CIA files released by WikiLeaks further weaken attempts to link Russia to DNC emails. Added problem for U.S. intelligence community assessment is that forensics were left to Democrat party contractor CrowdStrike, not conducted independently by U.S. gov. experts-Robert Parry, Consortium, 3/8/17. CrowdStrike's further conflict of interest is that of warmonger: it's on record trying to connect Russian military "hacking group" used against Ukraine to same "hacking group" allegedly used to access DNC emails-UK Guardian, 12/22/16

"Exclusive: The gauzy allegations of Russia “hacking” the Democrats to elect Donald Trump just got hazier with WikiLeaks’ new
revelations about CIA cyber-spying and the capability to pin the blame
on others, reports Robert Parry....

That revelation emerged from documents that WikiLeaks published on
Tuesday from a CIA archive that WikiLeaks said had apparently been
passed around within a community of former U.S. government hackers and
contractors before one of them gave WikiLeaks some of the material.

The documents revealed that the CIA can capture the content of
encrypted Internet and cell-phone messages by grabbing the material in
the fraction of a second before the words are put through encryption.

Another program called “Weeping Angel” can hack Samsung “smart” TVs
with built-in Internet connections, allowing the CIA and British
intelligence to covertly use the TVs as listening devices even when they
appear to be turned off.

Besides the 1984-ish aspects of these reported capabilities –
Orwell’s dystopia also envisioned TVs being used to spy on people in
their homes – the WikiLeaks’ disclosures add a new layer of mystery to
whether the Russians were behind the “hacks” of the Democratic Party or
whether Moscow was framed.

A former U.S. intelligence officer, cited by The Wall Street Journal
on Wednesday, acknowledged that the CIA’s “Umbrage” library of foreign
hacking tools could “be used to mask a U.S. operation and make it appear
that it was carried out by another country….That could be accomplished
by inserting malware components from, say, a known Chinese, Russian or
Iranian hacking operation into a U.S. one.”

While that possibility in no way clears Moscow in the case of the
Democratic “hack,” it does inject new uncertainty into the “high
confidence” that President Obama’s intelligence community expressed in
its assessment of Russian culpability. If the CIA had this capability to
plant false leads in the data, so too would other actors, both
government and private, to cover their own tracks.

CrowdStrike praised the hackers’ tradecraft as “superb, operational
security second to none”and added: “we identified advanced methods
consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate
targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft — both groups were
constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants,
modify persistent methods, move to new Command and Control channels
and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected.”

As Sam Biddle wrote
for The Intercept, “Would a group whose ‘tradecraft is superb’ with
‘operational security second to none’ reallyleave behind the name of a
Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American
journalists?Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave cyrillic
comments on these documents? Would these groups that ‘constantly
[go] back into the environment to change out their implants, modify
persistent methods, move to new Command and Control channels’ get
caught because they precisely didn’t make sure not to use IP addresses they’d been associated [with] before?

“It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by
one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services
in history, and that we know thisbecause they screwed up over and over
again.”

Sources and Methods

The WikiLeaks’ disclosures on Tuesday also demonstrate that the
pro-transparency Web site has a well-placed source with access to
sensitive U.S. intelligence data.

That reinforces the suggestion
from WikiLeaks’ associate, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, that
the emails purloined from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John
Podesta originated from U.S. intelligence intercepts and were then
leaked by an American insider to WikiLeaks, not obtained via a “hack”
directed by the Russian government.

Podesta’s association with the international lobbying firm, the
Podesta Group, could justify U.S. intelligence monitoring his
communicationsas a way to glean information about the strategies of Saudi Arabiaand other foreign clients.

Murray suggested that the earlier WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic
National Committee emails came from a Democratic insider, not from
Russia. In addition, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange has denied that
Russia was the source of either batch of Democratic emails, although he
refused to say who was.

Of course, it would be possible that Russia used American cutouts to
launder the emails without WikiLeaks knowing where the material
originated. And some cyber-experts, who were cited in press reports
about the new WikiLeaks’ disclosures on Tuesday, speculated, without
evidence, that perhaps Russia was the source of them, too.

Still, there are now fresh reasons to doubt the Official Narrative
that Russia “hacked” into Democratic emails in a covert operation
intended to throw the U.S. election to Donald Trump.

Those doubts already existed – or should have – because the U.S.
intelligence community refused to release any hard proof that the
Russians were responsible for the purloined Democratic emails.

On Jan. 6, just one day after Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper vowed to go to the greatest possible lengths to supply the
public with the evidence behind the accusations, his office released a 25-page report that contained no direct evidence that Russia delivered hacked emails from the DNC and Podesta to WikiLeaks.

The DNI report amounted to a compendium of reasons to suspect that
Russia was the source of the information – built largely on the argument
that Russia had a motive for doing so because of its disdain for
Democratic nominee Clinton and the potential for friendlier relations
with Republican nominee Trump.

A Big Risk

But the DNI’s case, as presented, was one-sided, ignoring other reasons why the Russians would not have taken the risk.

For instance, while it is true that many Russian officials, including
President Putin, considered Clinton to be a threat to worsen the
already frayed relationship between the two nuclear superpowers, the
report ignores the downside for Russia trying to interfere with the U.S.
election campaign and then failing to stop Clinton, which looked like
the most likely outcome until Election Night.

If Russia had accessed the DNC and Podesta emails and slipped them to
WikiLeaks for publication, Putin would have to think that the National
Security Agency, with its exceptional ability to track electronic
communications around the world, might well have detected the maneuver
and would have informed Clinton.

So, on top of Clinton’s well-known hawkishness, Putin would have
risked handing the expected incoming president a personal reason to take
revenge on him and his country. Historically, Russia has been very
careful in such situations, holding its intelligence collections for
internal purposes only and not sharing them with the public.

While it is conceivable that Putin decided to take this extraordinary
risk in this case – despite the widely held view that Clinton was a
shoo-in to defeat Trump – an objective report would have examined this
counter argument for him not doing so.

Though it’s impossible for an average U.S. citizen to know precisely
what the U.S. intelligence community may have in its secret files, some
former NSA officials who are familiar with the agency’s eavesdropping
capabilities say Washington’s lack of certainty suggests that the NSA
does not possess such evidence.That’s the view of William Binney, who retired as NSA’s technical
director of world military and geopolitical analysis and who created
many of the collection systems still used by NSA.

Binney, in an article
co-written with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, said, “With respect to
the alleged interference by Russia and WikiLeaks in the U.S. election,
it is a major mystery why U.S. intelligence feels it must rely on
‘circumstantial evidence,’ when it has NSA’s vacuum cleaner sucking up
hard evidence galore. What we know of NSA’s capabilities shows that the
email disclosures were from leaking, not hacking.”

Released last summer — around the time of the Democratic National
Convention — the DNC emails revealed senior party officials showing a
preference for former Secretary of State Clinton over Sen. Bernie
Sanders although the DNC was supposed to remain neutral.

Later in the campaign, the Podesta leak exposed the contents of
speeches that Clinton gave to Wall Street banks, which she wanted to
keep secret from the American voters, and the existence of pay-to-play
features of the Clinton Foundation.

News articles based on the WikiLeaks’ material embarrassed the DNC
and the Clinton campaign, but the rupture of secrets was not considered a
very important factor in Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. Clinton
herself blamed that surprising outcome on FBI Director James Comey’s
last-minute decision to briefly reopen the investigation into her
improper use of a private server for her emails as Secretary of State.

After Comey’s move, Clinton’s poll numbers cratered and she seemed
incapable of reversing the trend. More generally, Clinton faced
criticism for running an inept campaign that included her insulting many
Trump supporters by calling them “deplorables” and failing to
articulate a clear, hopeful vision for the future.

However, after the shock of Trump’s stunning victory began to wear
off, the outgoing Obama administration and angry Democrats began
singling out Putin as a chief culprit in Clinton’s defeat.

Despite the appearance that they were scapegoating America’s old
adversary – the Russkies – liberals and Democrats have used the
allegations to energize their base and put the young Trump
administration on the defensive, even though hard evidence to support
the accusations is still lacking.

The Democrats and Republicans ran between them close to 2 dozen
establishment candidates, most of whom acquiesced to policies that
saddled the country with endless regime change wars and a near
catastrophic financial meltdown that had devastating effects on millions
of people. That same government without a peep from most of these
candidates bailed out the banks but hung middle America out to dry with
lost jobs from unfair trade practices and lost homes from ruthless
foreclosures. Both Party’s establishment candidates were therefore not
trusted.

In the end, the Democratic Party had succeeded in knee capping
Independent Bernie Sanders, (at heart really a “New Deal democrat”) who
had earned the trust of most people across party lines whether they
agreed with his policies or not. Hillary Clinton as shown by the polls
was not well liked or trusted and seen as a supporter of unfair trade
deals and unscrupulous bankers who played fast and loose with a
deregulated – on her and Bill’s watch – financial market....

--------------- My comment to the above comment: Bernie was never a serious candidate. That was obvious if you saw him completely melt in front of Hillary at one of their early televised meetings. Standing next to each other, he gushed to her that he was tired of people talking about her emails. She lit up, smiled lovingly at him and said, thank-you. The Democrats needed somebody--anybody--to appear to be "running against" Hillary for the nomination. That's all Bernie was. People may have found him likeable, but he wasn't universally "trusted" as you suggest. When it came time to battle the globalist labor unions (that pretend to be for US workers) on anti-TPP trade deal language in Democrat platform meetings--after Bernie had lost the nomination but could've shown some fight for his supporters, he was completely ineffective:

(continuing): This theft has been supported by the entire political class every day since then. US taxpayers have been beaten and brutalized daily to create a $2 billion a day industry about something that doesn't exist (the urgent need to reduce global CO2 to zero)--dreamed up out of thin air--although it's a perfect weapon to demonize Americans and call them murderers. This behavior of the US political class toward its citizens fits Lemkin's definition of genocide (scroll down). We must in perpetuity admit we're bad and must turn over our wages to global thugs as "reparations" for our alleged climate harm--though no amount we pay can ever be enough. Even if US CO2 went to zero, it wouldn't make a dent in global CO2 because of China's large contribution. So, the word "respect" can't be used about Bernie Sanders since he hops on the global warming gravy train that robs from the poor and gives to the rich. As to Obama, what in the world makes you think he'd ever help you or the country out? After his 8 years of hob nobbing with coastal elites what does the Democrat Party stand for? Globalist profiteers, open borders, unmarried women, transgender bathrooms, non-whites, violent riots, and anarchy. Not enough to carry a major national political party. As to the GOP E, by the 2014 midterms it had perfected the practice of being a "political party" that had no agenda:

(continuing): What are you going to do about the Democrat Party's super delegates? How are you going to get the Democrat Party to give up even half of them? The GOP E has all kinds of delegates, back room deals, and dirty tricksters popping up out of the woodwork to prevent voters from getting the candidate they want. At least in one national election, their behavior resulted in Donald Trump.Hillary vs Bernie in 2016 brought the super delegate scam to light. Since the party won't give them up, what are Democrat voters going to do about it?

"1. The Government’s Role in Climate Science Funding...[is] embedded
in scores of agencies and programs scattered throughout the Executive
Branch of the US government. While such agency activities related to
climate science have received funding for many years as components of
their mission statements,the pursuit of an integrated national agenda
to study climate change and implement policy initiativestook a critical
step with passage of the Global Change Research Act of 1990.This Act
established institutional structures operating out of the White Houseto
develop and oversee the implementation of a National Global Change
Research Plan and created the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP)
to coordinate the climate change research activities of Executive
Departments and agencies.[33] As
of 2014, the coordination of climate change-related activities resides
largely in the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy,
which houses several separate offices, including the offices of
Environment and Energy, Polar Sciences, Ocean Sciences, Clean Energy and
Materials R&D, Climate Adaptation and Ecosystems, National Climate
Assessment, and others. The Office of the President also maintains the
National Science and Technology Council, which oversees the Committee on
Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability and its Subcommittee
on Climate Change Research. The Subcommittee is charged with the
responsibility of planning and coordinating with the interagency USGCRP.
Also, the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy is housed within
the President’s Domestic Policy Council. While Congress authorizes
Executive branch budgets, the priorities these departments and agencies
follow are set by the White House. As expressed in various agency and
Executive Branch strategic plans, these efforts have been recently
organized around four components comprising (1) climate change research
and education, (2) emissions reduction through “clean” energy
technologies and investments, (3) adaptation to climate change, and (4)
international climate change leadership.[36]....By any of
these measures, the scale of climate science R&D has increased
substantially since 2001. Perhaps, though, the largest funding increases
have occurred in developing new technologies and tax subsidies. As can
be seen from Table 1, federal dollars to develop and implement “clean
energy technologies” have increased from $1.7 billion in 2001 to $5.8
billion in 2013,while energy tax subsidies have increased from zero in
2001 and 2002 to $13 billion in 2013, with the largest increases
happening since 2010. The impact on scientific research of government
funding is not just a matter of the amounts but also of the
concentration of research monies that arises from the focus a single
source can bring to bear on particular kinds of scientific research.
Government is that single source and has Big Player effects because it
has access to a deep pool of taxpayer (and, indeed, borrowed and
created) funds combined with regulatory and enforcement powers which
necessarily place it on a different footing from other players and
institutions. Notwithstanding the interplay of rival interests within
the government and the separation of powers among the different
branches, there is an important sense in which government’s inherent
need to act produces a particular set of decisions that fall within a
relatively narrow corridor of ends to which it can concentrate
substantial resources.

2.By any standards,
what we have documented here is a massive funding drive,highlighting
the patterns of climate science RandD as funded and directed only by
the Executive Branch and the various agencies that fall within its
purview.[40]
To put its magnitude into some context, the $9.3 billion funding
requested for climate science RandD in 2013 is about one-third of the
total amount appropriated for all 27 National Institutes of Health in
the same year,[41]
yet it is more than enough to sustain a science boom. Its directional
characteristic, concentrated as it has been on R&D premised on the
controversial issue of the actual sensitivity of climate to human-caused
emissions, has gone hand in hand with the IPCC’s expressions of
increasing confidence in the AGW hypothesis and increasingly shrill
claims of impending disaster.

3. The recent pattern of federal climate science funding, moving toward
emphasis on the development of technologies and their subsidization
through the tax system, suggests that climate change funding has become
more tightly connected to agencies like the Department of Energy, NASA,
the Department of Commerce (NOAA), EPA, and cross-cutting projects and
programs involving multiple agencies under integrating and coordinating
agencies, like the USGCRP, lodged within the Executive branch. The
allocations of budgets within these agencies are more directly
determined and implemented by Administration priorities and policies. We
note that the traditional role of NSF in supporting basic science based
on a system of merit awards provided (despite some clear imperfections)
certain advantages with regard to generating impartial science. In
contrast, even a casual perusal of current agency documents, such as The
National Science and Technology Council’s The National Global Change Research Plan 2012-2021, shows that those driving this movement make no pretense as to their premises and starting points.[39]

4. To be sure, the very opaqueness of these allocations and their
actual use only provides for “ball park” estimates. However, we believe
that the results presented in Table 3 come closer to a useful accounting
than what previously has been provided. We have combined data from
Leggett et al. (2013) and the AAAS Reports for Fiscal Years 2012 and
2013 (the only years for which the AAAS provides detailed budgetary data
for climate science R&D and climate-related funding). This
constrains Table 3 to including data only from 2010 through 2013. We
have adjusted budgetary data and categorized it in light of discussion
points 1-5 above. Note that the estimated aggregate expenditures for
climate science and climate-related funding (excluding tax subsidies)
from 2010-2013 in Table 3 are about twice that of the Leggett findings.

5.5 Funds administered by the Treasury Department in Table 2 are
credit lines and loans channeled through the World Bank earmarked for
international organizations to finance clean technologies and
sustainable practices; consequently such funds would also more
accurately be considered as climate-related sustainability and
adaptation....

8. This summary and the detail in Table 1, however, do not capture the
full scale of federal funding for climate science R&D. Two
complications must be considered to capture a more accurate estimate.
First, the entries in the first row of Table 1 for climate science only
refer to monies administered by the Executive branch via the office of
the USGCRP and does not include all climate-related R&D in the
federal budget. For example, the entry in Table 1 for the USGCRP in 2011
is just under $2.5 billion; yet the actual budget expenditures for
climate science-related R&D as calculated by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) total about $16.1
billion.[38]
In addition, since USGCRP funding is comprised of monies contributed
from the authorized budgets of the 13 participating departments and
agencies, a more accurate estimate of climate-related R&D requires
deducting USGCRP funding from the aggregated budgets of those 13, most
of which are included in Table 2.

9. Leggett et al. (2013) of the Congressional Research Service provides
a recent account of climate change funding based on data provided by
the White House Office of Management and Budget (see Table 1, below).
Total expenditures for federal funded climate change programs from
2001-2013 were $110.9 billion in current dollars and $120.2 billion in
2012 dollars. “Total budgetary impact” includes various tax provisions
and subsidies related to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (which are
treated as “tax expenditures”) and shows total climate change
expenditures from 2001-2013 to be $145.3 billion in current dollars and
$155.4 billion in 2012 dollars.[37]

10. The USGCRP operates as a confederacy of the research components of
thirteen participating government agencies, each of which independently
designates funds in accordance with the objectives of the USGCRP; these
monies comprise the program budget of the USGCRP to fund agency
cross-cutting climate science R&D.[34]
The departments and agencies whose activities comprise the bulk of such
funding include independent agencies such as the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, Environmental
Protection Agency, US Agency for International Development, the
quasi-official Smithsonian Institute, and Executive Departments that
include Agriculture, Commerce (National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology), Energy,
Interior (the US Geological Survey and conservation initiatives),
State, and Treasury.[35]